I Can’t Be More Specific About the Location of the Green Food in Your Teeth Than I’ve Been Over the Last Few Excruciating Minutes.
2012 called and it wants its kale back.
I love that we’ve managed to find time for coffee or lunch every few weeks. All relationships should have this level of calibrated mindful honesty. No bullshit, no judgment. Thank you for this interpersonal oasis that can only come with maturity!
Did I show you this unbelievably gaslighting email from this guy at work? Hey, there’s something in your teeth, by the way.
You are brushing invisible crumbs away from your cheeks. My bad. I probably said “there’s something in your teeth” in a way that implied ‘in’ meant ‘near’. Could have gone either way. It’s in, in.
While you are doing that thing with your tongue, I’ll continue to vent. It’s that same guy I usually pretty much tolerate until, bam, out comes his true self: he who needs endless validation to the point of altering reality.
Still there. This is completely and utterly the fault of the food, obviously. 2012 called and it wants its kale back, right? Stupid kale. But you are so healthy to have ordered it.
Oh gosh, not there either — I totally defer to you on, like, process and what you do with your own thumbnail, but you do realize you are just putting your thumbnail up and down between your two front teeth, and not quite exactly making it to the gum.
Also, though, not your fault. We can blame evolution. It’s so annoying how evolution schemed to make it that we don’t really chew with our two front teeth, making them unlikely to reflect our post-masticatory efforts. I miss having time to masticate.
Ok, here we go, I’m showing you where it is on me, because we are still doing this. Watch me. You got this. You really got this. Left. LEFT. Your left. Which is my right. FIGURE THIS OUT. WE ARE FACING EACH OTHER.
Sorry about that. It’s not you. Mirroring is really confusing for all of us. Apparently you have to be fucking Einstein or a trained mime or a developmental psychologist to eat in this café, what’s up with that?
Your hand is now covering your entire mouth which makes it a teeny bit hard to say if it’s gone but I’m sure it is because I have faith in you as a human person embodying dignity. I could be wrong, but it might be easier to tell whether the food is gone from your teeth — again — the left top teeth here — if your hand were not covering your face.
Sweet Jesus. We are down to one quadrant of your mouth, the upper left, your left, and we’ve ruled out the front teeth and the back molars.
WHAT CAN I DO HERE TO FURTHER DIRECT YOU AND BE THAT HONEST FRIEND WHO TELLS YOU IF THERE IS SOMETHING IN YOUR TEETH OR THAT YOU ARE GOING ON ABOUT WORK TOO MUCH OR THAT YOU SHOULD NEVER, EVER GO NEAR ANYTHING IN THE PANINI FAMILY?
DO YOU NEED ME TO GOOGLE THE PRECISE MEDICAL NAMES OF THE THREE OR SO TEETH THERE, CANINES AND PRE-MOLARS OR SOME SHIT, WHICH IS PRETTY MUCH THE ONLY THING I CAN DO BEFORE GOING BACK TO TALKING ABOUT THE GUY AT WORK I NEED TO FLATTER, SHORT OF CALLING MY DENTAL HYGIENIST, WHO LIKE YOU HAS GREAT HAIR, OR POST IN OUR NETWORKS, WHICH ARE REALLY LARGE AND DIVERSE, FOR A FORENSIC DENTIST?
Your teeth look great.
You are so totally awesome.
I wish all relationships were as straightforward as ours!
Rachel Geman is a connoisseur of dental floss who can handle a medium-well level of honesty in relationships. In the unlikely event the friends she has coffee with or the colleagues she has law stuff with read this, this is fiction.
